Classroom of One: How Online Learning is Changing our Schools and Colleges
Maeroff, G. I. (2003). A classroom of one: How online learning is changing our schools and colleges. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Chapter 1 An Invitation to a Revolution With the aid of technology wide-range one-on-one education may be closer at hand than ever before.An encounter between student and teacher via the Internet is very different from the exchanges in formal classrooms that have until now characterized education.This fulfillment of the classroom of one embodies an intimacy all its own. E-learning has come to the scene to augment and sometimes supplant the traditional classroom. By the end of the 21st century’s first decade, e-learning will be an embedded feature of education, widely available and no longer an object of controversy. Instructors who incoming years ignore the potential of web-based embellishments will be as remiss as their peers of past years who did not expect students to enrich their learning by consulting sources beyond their books. Online education is here to stay and the technology will fade into the background for most students, essential but not of great concern to them, a kind of catalyst to a learning revolution. The future of online learning is taking shape along these lines:
virtual schools and colleges that exist wholly online, operating without campuses;
brick-and-mortar educational institutions that offer a rowing number of courses entirely online but at which most classes continue to meet in person;
brick-and-mortar educational institutions that offer few course entirely online but with web-based features in an increasing number of campus-based courses.
EDUCATIONAL CHOICE Choice is the order of the day, especially in elementary and secondary education.Charter schools began operating at the start of the 1990s and spread through the country by the end of the decade. Online learning injects fresh possibilities into the most extreme version of choice, school vouchers, raising the possibility of awarding vouchers to be spent for online education, including education of a private and secretarian nature that can be carried out at home. Benefits at the Elementary and Secondary Levels Online learning may turn out to be the greatest bonus ever for home schooling.At the Western PA Cyber Charter School, instructional methods took four main forms:
real-time, online synchronous instruction, in which students communicated with teachers from their computers as the teacher taught the lessons;
asynchronous instruction in which students worked on their own and later received messages on their computers from the teachers;
web-based, packaged programs consisting of a pretest, a tutorial, a practice, and a post-test that the student submitted electronically, without contact with teachers;
traditional book-based courses in which students, working online at a pace that they set for themselves, got assignments, turned them in, and received responses from teachers.
Cyber schooling could be a route to public funding to enable children at home to get the education of their choice, even if they study in the privacy of their homes as a religious slant. Online learning could make inroads among the 53 million children who study at the elementary and secondary level. GLOBALIZATION AND THE IMPLICATIONS FOR ONLINE EDUCATION The need for new ways to deliver education is seen in its starkest terms outside the US.The educational challenge remains monumental in many parts of the world. Online Learning around the World On top of fiscal obstacles, geographic constraints in societies that are still mostly rural make it impossible to gather a critical mass of students in many places.The problems feed upon themselves.Political instability, too, haunts the classrooms that do exist in underdeveloped countries.In addition, ethnic minorities and disabled children need not even try to enter classrooms in countries where discrimination is ripe. Events in several parts of the world at the beginning of this century underscored the growing possibilities for e-learning.Examples: Tunisia, Japan, Britain, the University of Virginia, The United States Army Controversy over the Globalization of Learning Trade regulation is not the only threat to worldwide cyber learning.Those who want to control the globalization of education through the Internet have other weapons in their arsenal, making it possible for them to use technology to trump technology. Finally, there is a matter of ensuring that the quality of the online version of an American education offered overseas equals what students get on campus. INFLUENCE ON POLICY Making Other Adjustments Policies regarding the implementation of online learning will have to take greater cognizance of the impact on teaching. Schools, colleges, and universities should recognize as they move toward an online presence that success depends on acting in ways that encourage and assist faculty to alter habits and attitudes that have sustained their entire careers. Teaching online calls for a thoughtful interweaving of the old and the new, making a course more than simply a collection of lecture notes delivered by computer. It would be unwise to regard online learning as the salvation of education, the panacea for the ills of a system that has often been inflexible and reluctant to change. Online courses are revolutionary because they represent a fundamentally different delivery system that breaks the monopoly of a classroom forcing an examination of habits of teaching and learning that for too long have defied scrutiny.Online learning will not banish the many problems of teaching and learning, but it offers one more tool for trying to deal with them.
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Chapter 2 Delivering the Goods The ability to learn depends, as always, primarily on the learner, regardless of setting.Interaction with an instructor and even with other students can help promote learning, but it is clearly not essential. Attendance in a classroom remains the standards by which most people define as “going to school”, and they will do so for the foreseeable future.Using a computer as the main vehicle for formal education remains alien to most Americans. The time has arrived to encourage learning that breaks free of the classroom if it can serve the needs of students without short-changing them. DISTANCE EDUCATION HISTORY Online learning stemmed from correspondence courses from such institutions as The University of Missouri, Penn State. Each advance in technology during the twentieth century added its imprint to distance education.Film in the first two decade, radio in the 20s and 30s, the TV in the 1950s. The newness of online learning in not the use of distance education or the idea that students might pursuer knowledge largely on their own, but the fact that it harnesses digital technology for this purpose. REALITIES OF THE TRADTIONAL CLASSROOM “The reason that students can remember the few teachers who changed their lives is because genuine interactions between teachers and students are so rare.” “On-campus, real-time, face-to-face teaching relations are experienced by some prospective students as high-pressure, uncomfortable and even exclusionary circumstances.” “The majority of individuals learn little from someone’s simply telling them something, but this is precisely what continues to happen in a tremendous number of classrooms across the country.” The most familiar mode of learning for most Americans is a straightforward lecture.Detractors deplore lecture method as uninspired, nonparticipatory, unengaging, and nonproductive of learning. Lectures are by no means the sum and substance of online learning, nor should they be, but so long as instructors lecture they may as well do so at a time and place convenient to students, which online education permits. ONLINE LEARNING AS AN ALTERNATIVE Examples: University of Central Florida was pushed into online education because it ran out of space in parking lots, San Diego State University, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. E-learning elicits anew familiar questions about pedagogical practices.How long should students take to submit work?How quickly should e-messages receive responses?What should instructors do about students who fail to contribute to collaborative assignments or do not sign into courses regularly?How may one monitor cheating and plagiarism when students work out of sight?Are there occasions to ask students, if possible, to gather in person?Which tasks are best done synchronously or asynchronously?What instructional responsibilities can instructors rightfully delegate to assistants? Delivering Content The main goal of e-learning is convenience for the learner, rendering it unnecessary to appear at a certain place at a certain time. Knowing that a course is delivered online does not reveal the extent to which the instructor created the course.And it is this idea, the possibility that someone other than the instructor produced the content that adds to the controversy surrounding online education. Designing Courses for Web Delivery It is, in fact, possible that it can take longer, up to 66 to 500 percent longer, according to a study by the American Federation of Teachers, to create an online course than to prepare a course to teach in person. The demands of course design resonate in ways that those unfamiliar with online learning may not immediately appreciate.All aspects of digital design should strive for simplicity to enable students to concentrate on learning. E-learning, to a degree greater than any previous way of formally distributing knowledge, offers the possibility of disaggregating content, design and instruction. Instructing Online Online learning calls for fresh attention to the need to engage students, to respond to them properly and efficiently, and to ensure each step of the way that students understand the course work even though they are not in the same room to say in person that they “don’t get it”. Good online learning requires considerable preparation.It begins with content.Then, technology enters the picture and rearranges the elements in ways that make e-leaning considerably different from the classroom.The design of the course, the way it goes onto the web, and the manner which students access it affect outcomes.The person leading the course becomes the intermediary between content and student. Students on the receiving end of knowledge delivered in this way must prepare themselves for a more active role than they have taken in regular classrooms.No passive vessels here.
Chapter 3 The Nature of Interaction Online providers face the challenge of countering the possible negative effects of isolation in a classroom of one. Florida Virtual strove to ensure that e-learning did not lead students to complete their course work in isolation.The school asked teachers to contact students on a regular basis. Online education has the potential to transform interaction into a learning task.Online courses have to give students opportunities to interact with the instructor and with each other. An online course, properly crafted, builds in many opportunities for students to advance their learning through responses and discussion. The enhancement of online learning through interaction comes in both synchronous and asynchronous exchanges. KEEPING STUDENTS ENGAGED IN VIRTUAL CLASSROOMS The Florida Virtual School tried to offset the isolation of students by offering them the chance to join clubs. Another form of interaction in online learning involves putting classmates in contact in “live” time.Synchronous approaches in which students are online concurrently replicate some of the spontaneity of the classroom. Written discussion replaces oral discourse in online learning. A PLATFORM FOR LEARNING
Most educational institutions depend on commercial companies to provide the technological expertise that enables them to offer online courses and to make them interactive. Platform Companies include: Blackboard, Inc. ECollege WebCT Apex Learning Adjuncts to Platforms – other tools Horizonlive eArmyU.com SMARTTHINKING GALILEO COLLABORATION Proponents of the virtual classroom speak often of learning communities, students working together in groups to advance their knowledge.Advocates of collaborative inquiry maintain that this approach stimulates and supports students, motivating them to learn. Online education can multiply the advantages for students, many of whom welcome interaction that helps overcome some of the isolation. Group learning online still has many of the same strengths and weaknesses as group learning by students who attend courses in person. Online groups bog down with lazy members. Large class size can overwhelm possibilities of collaboration Online learning communities, connected by software, enable students to collaborate with classmates whom they never see, and effort to emulate in virtual settings one of the features of well-organized courses that meet in person.
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Chapter 4 Facilitating the Conversation INTERACTING ELECTRONICALLY Most of today’s cyber learning builds on that relationship and, in some ways, represents an elaboration on the ways of correspondence – providing an ease, speed and capacity for the written word far exceeding what was possible by mail.Instructors of online courses say that cyber learning has electronic dialogue at its heart.Key components include: electronic bulletin boards, chat rooms, and email.These communication methods hold the potential for turning online courses into seminars. Email While online learning would be unthinkable without email, it serves as a vital resource of many courses that meet entirely in classrooms. One of the most important roles of email in online learning is the access to the instructor that it provides for students.This way of communicating interweaves the schedules of morning people and night people, those who travel and those who remain on campus. Can the ease of email lead to too much interaction?Online course should take steps to not let a flood of email inundate them. Bulletin Boards and Chat Rooms Much of e-learning depends on more than reading the lessons.Instructors use electronic discussions to extend and elaborate on what students have read. The anonymity of online interaction can cut in two ways.Physical features of people who might be subject to bias in person are not apparent, yet there is a downside to removing signs of physical differences.Also, online discussions lacking face-to-face proximity, lead to unpleasantries in some courses. Video and Audio Videoconferencing could well remain an important technology despite the availability of the web. The telephone remains a toll of distance education during the cyber age.
In many of the best online courses, electronic conversation is an important vehicle of learning.This means not only teacher-to-student conversation, but also student-to-student. _
Chapter 5 Adapting to the New College students come to college with an understanding of the tools of technology. HOW ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY STUDENTS ADAPT Indications are the many more students in elementary and secondary school would take courses online if supporters promoted the concept and more spaces were available to enroll. The first two schools developed online from K12, Inc were Pennsylvania Virtual Charter School and Colorado Virtual Academy. Online studies are not appropriate for all youngsters.The executive director of Florida Virtual uses a simple three-part test.
Ask whether the student can mange time
Ask whether the student can summon up motivation
Ask whether the student can work without a teacher in the room
CHALLENGES IN ADAPTING TO ONLINE LEARNING If the content of the courses in unsatisfactory, e-learning will lose potential adherents no matter how many people turn on. Achievement Proponents of distance education, including online learning, have been so focused on the question of whether the process leads to the same achievement levels as classroom-based instruction that they have a website dedicated to this issue. A review of findings on student achievement from one group of researchers concluded that there were no significant differences in achievement among students taught through various delivery systems. Another study on student outcomes in sections of a microeconomics course at Michigan State U.found that students scored better on tests if they took the courses in the classroom. Satisfaction Educators paid little attention to student satisfaction in their classrooms until college students began rating their professors. Among research finding are some indicating that interaction between students and instructors tends to increase satisfaction with online learning. Not surprisingly, students are less satisfied when technical difficulties and poor course design complicate their work on the computer and interfere with their online studies. In general, students who adapt themselves to e-learning argue that it breeds satisfaction because it offers more convenience than classrooms in terms of time and place. Faculty cited satisfaction with increased access to students, increased knowledge and experience with educational technologies, increased opportunities for interaction with students, and positive student outcomes. Learning Styles While researchers have much to learn about how online learning meshes with learning styles, one study on this question found that students with sequential learning styles showed more preference for online education than did other kinds of learners. Other Considerations Students in online courses appear to have more staying power than those in correspondence courses. Online learning extends great independence to students, requiring them to have motivation and to common up more self-discipline than the usual classroom course demands. Technology, when it goes awry, exacerbates the problem, creating disincentives that courses in the classroom can avoid. ADAPTATIONS BY FACULTY While online learning calls for obvious adaptations on the part of students, it also requires much of the same of faculty, almost all of whom have spent their careers meeting students in classrooms. Helping Online Instructors Adapt Commercial software, like Blackboard, helps create content, mange courses and carry out interactive activities eases the transition to e-learning for faculty members. Learning the Steps of a New Dance Training is critical for online instructors.The chapter outlines trainings from the University of Phoenix and the Art Institute Online. It is wrong-minded to assume those who have taught in traditional classrooms will automatically be able to do the same in a virtual classroom.
Chapter 6 Responsibility for Learning Students need to be prepared to take online courses.Self-assessments are a common method to find out student preparedness.Such questions include:
Do I like working on a computer?
Am I comfortable resolving technology problems when they arise?
Would I want to lean new software, or a set of online procedures, just to access the course materials or to chat with the faculty and others who are taking the course?
Do I work well alone?
Am I self-disciplined enough to follow the lessons on my own without peer pressure or pressure from the course instructor?
Will I be comfortable if I don’t get to see the instructor in person?
Will I be comfortable if I have to ask questions via email?
TRUST The formal classroom, in part, is predicated on the assumption that many students lack initiative: someone needs to prod them.The idea is that sitting in a classroom will prevent them from doing something else during time assigned for their learning.For the most part, a lack of trust pervades the traditional system. Online education revolves around trust, placing the destiny of students in their hands, an approach that may motivate some learners.Sloth and dishonesty are enemies of online learning. MOTIVATION Motivated students make obvious candidates for online courses, but perhaps this kind of education also suits some less obvious candidates, students how have not previously taken responsibility for their learning in traditional classrooms. Making more the decisions about their education may spur some students to learn.E-learning, who offers greater possibilities for empowering learners in this way, might appeal to some students who have enjoyed limited success in classrooms, where they chafe under authority. Solving the Motivation Puzzle Deborah Stipek wrote some recommendations in her book Motivation to Learn that include:
Allow students to participate in the design of their academic tasks
Give students choices in how tasks are completed
Let students have some choice in the difficulty levels of assignments or tasks that they complete
Give students some discretion about when they complete particular tasks.
Online courses, pursued in private, might offer respite from these pressures, but this is not an easy solution as some teenagers have little inclination to study on their own. Instructors at all levels should recognize the need to motivate students.Preparation to teach, in person or online, is incomplete without attention to what teacher can do to prod students to learn. Those who design online course can bring the far-ranging resources of the Internet to academic tasks that are both creative and filled with substantial learning. Online learning with its potential for a do-it-yourself approach is replete with motivational possibilities. “A successful online student has the desire to want to learn and is willing to make the sacrifices of time and effort to do so.” Life experience and maturity provide perspective that may help motivate certain learners.Given their limited life experiences and the fact that they have not yet embarked on career, younger students probably have different motivational issues. Ultimately, whether in classrooms or online, students needs to take greater responsibility for their own learning as they advance beyond the elementary grades. One might characterize online learning as an experiment in the degree to which students can take responsibility for their own education. LEARNING HOW TO LEARN The idea that students should learn how to learn has been a fundamental principle of formal education.In the book How People Learn, the National Research Council said that students must learn to recognize when they understand the materials at hand and when they need more information.The book proposed three key questions about students that go to the core of self-directing learning:
What strategies might they use to assess whether they understand someone else’s meaning?
What kinds of evidence do they need in order to believe particular claims?
How can they build their own theories of phenomena and test them effectively?
Knowing how to learn means pacing oneself. Regardless of the content of an online course, a student has to figure out how to navigate through avenues and to recognize landmarks never before encountered. Students need to know how to conduct research and look for answers.
STUDENT SUPPORT SERVICES Expecting online students to take responsibility for their learning should not absolve educational institutions of certain obligation, especially in terms of technical and academic support. An institution that doesn’t plan to offer steady and reliable technical support to its students ought not to bother with online learning. Technical Support Difficulties that have nothing to do with the content of the lessons can readily undo online leaning if left unattended. Academic Support Online education tends to give less attention to academic support than to technical support.A lack of academic support can exacerbate feelings of isolation and undermine online students. An example of the possibilities of online academic support comes from a company that specialized in this area, leaving it to others to offer the actual courses – SMARTTHINKING, Inc.The company was bale to offer the service around the clock by including on its staff English-speaking tutors abroad. Academic support of this sort could very likely raise retention rates and course completion in online courses, where students sometime give up in frustration.
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Chapter 7 The Business of Online Education Education has not been immune from the mania for profits that wept through the digital world and fueled the dot-com phenomenon.Most online education ended up in the hands of traditional colleges and universities.A sizable portion of online providers, though, were commercial enterprises with no links to nonprofit education. COMPETING FOR STUDENTS AND MONEY One must distinguish hybrid or blended courses that incorporate features of both classroom and the WWW from courses that are wholly online. Implementing e-learning was for many educational institutions a defensive action. Competition of all sorts has plowed its way into education. Questions arose at the elementary and secondary level as states and local school districts went online with cyber public schools, often operating under charters.PA’s experience was instructive.The state passed a charter school act in 1997 which cyber schools were founded.The law provided charter schools with 80 percent of the amount that the home district would have spent on the child in the regular school.Students in PA gained the ability to attend charter schools anywhere in the state. The provision meant, however, that the per-pupil amounts following each child to a cyber charter school varied, according to the spending of the child’s district.The charter school spent an average of $6,000 per pupil.Some public school systems refused to pay the invoices that cyber charter schools sent for the children who resided in the districts. The idea that proponents of online learning have taken advantage of charter legislation to establish schools should offend no one.A cyber school is as legitimate a charter school as one that classrooms provide.What has proven disturbing has been the failure of some such schools to monitor the progress of students and to maintain educational quality. One study of the financing of virtual K though 12 schools proposed a two-stage implementation strategy for states across the country.In the first stage, states would heavily subsidize the cost of online courses used by public schools.In the second stage, public schools would gradually assume the costs of online courses and would not charge regularly enrolled students. Nick Trombetta, superintendent of the Midland PA SD and CEO of the Western PA Cyber Charter School operated by the district, said that while he was pleased to see the school thrive, he worried that the rush to create such online K12 schools would drain dollars from school districts across PA, undermining public education in regular schools. One of the difficulties facing those who seek gain from online learning and even not-for-profit providers has been a paucity of reliable information about the field. “No one knows how many students taken an e-learning course in any given year; now how much colleges and universities spend d in pursuit of e-learning initiatives; now what the students themselves spend.” Some companies involved in online education profit from the infrastructure, not the courses.Other companies create and sell courses and even offer courses that generate tuition revenues from accredited institutions. EARLY MISHAPS ON THE PATH TO PROFITS Virtual Temple was supposed to liberate the university from some pressures, but it turned out to be a far more expensive undertaking that the decision makers apparently anticipated.The university apparently discovered that it could not afford the steep costs associated with creating online courses, marketing them, and building and maintaining an infrastructure to support the online enterprise. NYUonline also experiences a similar demise.Both Virtual Temple and NYUonline hold several lessons for other institutions.
Keep a tight focus in cyber programs and not try to do too much
A provider reduces chances for success when program development costs mount too high to amortize over a reasonable period.
An online program may not get the help it needs from other sectors of the institution if those sectors are not enlisted as allies early in the process.
A BUSINESSLIKE APPROACH Traditional higher education’s fascination with the goal of profiting from online ventures had its counterpart in the trend by for-profit businesses to extend them into conventional learning. Three universities took a businesslike approach to online learning including, Penn State, Cornell and Columbia. BUSINESS IN EDUCATION For businesses, the web represents just another method for trying to boost profits.One example is Sylvan Leaning Systems. E-learning has become a vehicle by which some universities take on more and more attributes of business, with interlocking subsidiaries and infusions of venture capital.
Chapter 8 Focusing E-Learning on Careers THE SPECIAL CASE OF PROFESSIONAL AND CONTINUING EDUCATION Close Ties to Technical Education The Pursuit of Career-Oriented Students Both for-profit providers and traditional institutions of higher education have recognized that one of the best chances for early acceptance of online courses resized in offering them to people who must need them for instrumental purposes, courses with content to advance their careers or allow them to embark on new careers. HOW TWO UNIVERISTIES PURUSED WORKING ADULTS Recognizing career-minded, working adults as a prime constituency for online learning, some colleges and universities carefully structured their approach to appeal to this market. THE CONTINUING EDUCATION OF TEACHERS Purveyors of online learning see elementary and secondary teachers as constituting one of the biggest potential markets.State regulations and collective bargaining contracts mandate that teachers engage in continued learning, so-called in-service education, once they are on the job.
_ Chapter 9 But is it Legitimate? Plagiarism is a long standing problem that technology exacerbates.Though it would not end the practice, it would help if instructors did more to teach students the elements of research and deepen their understanding of the differences between citing someone else’s work and appropriating it as one’s own. “There is more cause for concern about academic integrity in the average freshman or sophomore lecture hall than there is online”, said Wallace Pond, chief academic officer of Education America’s online campus. “In a well-taught online course with an involved professor and 25 students, it would be difficult for a student to put bits and pieces of someone else’s work into his work.Everything, every word, in an online course is archived.The professor can go back and review all of the student’s work.” – Pond HOLDING ONLINE TO A HIGHER STANDARD Why hold online learning to a higher standard than other kinds of distance education or, for that matter, than traditional classroom education? Critics are concerned that what may appear to be a proper academic course online may actually lack quality control. EVALUATING ONLINE LEARNING One of the most common questions about online learning is whether it is better than education in the classroom, implying that being as good is not enough.Research is just starting to emerge.Two of the most obvious yardsticks have to do with course design and the interactivity of the course. The happy medium in design reflects itself in a course that takes advantage of technology to deepen education, making it more memorable and providing learning experiences beyond those apt to be possible without the Internet.Interactivity should use technology to connect students in meaningful ways to the instructor and to each other. Evaluations of MBA courses at the University of Baltimore suggest that:
The materials used in online courses got higher rating than those used in classroom-based courses.
Students gave higher marks to instructor who taught face-to-face, which brings about another consideration.
SPECIAL PROBLEMS IN ASSESSING ONLINE STUDENTS Proctors and Other Assessment Devices The question of who is taking the tests and doing the work that students submit as their own continues to plague online providers.It is incumbent on schools and colleges to do all they can to guarantee the integrity of the process.Invisibility remains one of the most troubling features.The growth and acceptance of online educational depends on providers’ assuring the legitimacy of academic outcomes. Florida Virtual conducts phone conversations with students to ensure student knowledge of key topics. Assessment as an Ongoing Process The irony of concern about how best to assess student sin online course to prevent dishonesty is that it comes when online testing of students in classroom-based course is proliferating. Careful test design and diligent monitoring reduce dishonesty, but cheating occurs whether students take tests in person or online. The idea of separating education from traditional classrooms and, moreover, making it dependent on technology offends some people.Yet, another concern lurks among those who challenge the legitimacy of e-learning. Perhaps the best action may be to give e-learning a chance, recognizing that, like all infants, it will take some flops, and to wait and see what emerges.In the meanwhile, brick-and-mortar institutions can learn from it, shamelessly borrow from it, and co-opt its best features. _ Chapter 10 Controlling the Process Many of the laws and regulations affecting education will have to change to accommodate the possibilities made possible in teaching and learning online.Online courses demand a new way to deal with funding formulas, attendance and time requirements for courses, residency rules, and eligibility for financial aid, the mandated size of library collections, standards for academic credit, student-teacher ratios, and pay scales. THE ROLE OF ACCREDITATION Applying the Right Criteria Sandra Elman of the Northwest Association of Schools, Colleges and Universities said, “What is important is that [online learning] not be any more rigorous or any less rigorous.You want a level of consistency and equity in dealing with a new dimension of instruction.It should not be held to a high standard.” Accrediting agencies potentially face many questions as they scrutinize online learning.They should look for differences in content and quality between courses offered in classrooms and over the Internet and see whether institutions hold students in classrooms and online to identical standards. The Report of the Web-Based Education Commission to the President and the Congress on the US recommend these six proposals for accreditors to consider in connection with online courses:
Determine whether new accreditation review standards and practices are needed to develop these tools where appropriate.
Provide assistance to institutions, programs and new providers to develop internal quality review procedures for web-based learning.
Explore whether and how the regional accrediting agencies should expand beyond their traditional focus on nonprofit institutions to include more for-profit institutions.
Develop an improved capacity for course accreditation to accompany institutional and programmatic accreditation.
Strengthen coordination among accreditors to respond to web-based learning with agreed upon standards.
Create partnerships for review of web-based learning where appropriate with other external quality reviewers.
Sorting Out Accreditation Issues REGULATION ISSUES Wrestling with New Issues Defining Quality Course offered online vary greatly not only in quality but in the degree to which they are scrutinized by the institutions that offer them. Officials of the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) said they were uncertain of the effects of the Principles of Good practice, which the organization promulgated for the 2000-01 academic year.They believed, though, that a three-step process they established to undergird the principles helped promote good practice
An institution must evaluate a proposed online course against the principles themselves.
The state in which the institution is located must endorse the course with particular emphasis on how well the proposal provides for related student services.
After the first two steps, SREB measures the proposed course according to a template it has developed for itself.
Dealing with K through 12 Cyber Schools Aside from the quality of the learning, much of the concern about theses schools centers on matters of funding and accountability. Critics generally do not accept the notion, though, of pupils in elementary and secondary schools taking their entire program online.They worry that usually only adults have sufficient motivation to study online.They see cyber schools as a financial threat to brick-and-mortar schools.One must question the advisability of letting several cyber schools operate in a single state, such as PA. Ohio and PA provide ideal cases for examining these issues.In both state, cyber education gained a foothold b flying under the radar, using laws that authorized charter schools to establish themselves.In PA, the state school board association similarly challenged the law that it said authorized charter schools to serve individual schools districts, not the entire state, as the cyber charter schools ended up doing. THE FACULTY CONNECTION No discussion of quality standards for online learning can be complete without consideration of the ways in which the process affects the role of teachers and their relationships to students. Faculty worries how online learning will affect the institution’s reputation, but their concerns do not stop there.They fear they may be asked to do more work without adequate remuneration.They pose questions about quality control.They wonder about job protection. Extra Work Institutions still struggle to determine whether the work involved in teaching an online course equals a course taught in person, or whether an altogether different formula should apply. Another aspect of the workload has to do with contact time with students.Students expect quick responses to their e-mails and to contributions to discussions. The US Dept. of Education found that those teaching distance education courses had slightly more office hours and more contact with students, including amore extensive exchange of e-messages with students, than colleagues who did not teach such courses. According to the report, those teaching distance education courses “appeared to interact with students or be available to them more” than their colleagues who only taught face-to-face classes.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS The American Council on Education (ACE) said that ownership of electronic courses could be evaluated along a continuum that depended on whether faculty created courses on their own initiative (owned by the faculty member), under a contract with the institution (owned by the institution), or as a combination or the two (owned by both).The organization recommended a six step process for colleges and universities to follow to clarify questions involving intellectual property.
Clarify the definition of intellectual property and the circumstance under which the institution will assume the costs of protecting intellectual property.
Define inventor and author rights, including rights of revision and adaptation, reproduction, display, and the most important, ownership.
Identify when and how the institution can use intellectually property generated by faculty whether it is via ownership or licenses, exclusive, nonexclusive, for internal and noncommercial purposes only, and what temporal or employment-related limitations exist.
Clarify how faculty will be compensated for the development and preparation of distance learning courses and how the parties will share any royalties generated by the course.
Identify who will administer the institution’s intellectual property policies and what will be the initial dispute mechanism.
Clarify when the inventor or author can use the institution’s names and logos when commercializing a work.
The other side of this issue has to do with protecting not just the intellectual property of faculty who put their materials online, but material that others have produced and the faculty appropriate for use in the online course.
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Chapter 11 In School, On Campus The threat posed by online learning may lead traditional schools to make themselves over in ways more friendly to students and more closely aligned with students’ actual needs, in and out of the classroom. THE TIME AND PLACE OF LEARNING Distance education’s most distinguishing feature is the ability it gives students to learn at their own pace at a place of their choosing. When instructors move their courses to the Internet to facilitate pacing, they usually stipulate a length of time by which students must complete various phases of the work. There seems to be a consensus that online courses best serve the interests of students when they contain deadlines that keep students involved in the work. Virtual High School found that “timeline and deadlines must be clear and must be enforced…with explicit consequences if they are not met.” Online learning causes more frequent questioning of the need for precise requirements for seat time.It underscores the challenge to the rigid structure of the traditional system of semesters and quarters that dictates the length of courses and speed with which students may advance. Until the 1960s, students spent 4 years at a single institution.Transferring from one college to another represented failure in those days. Most students enrolled in online courses today are also on-campus learners who take an online course or two in addition to campus classes. Faculty members combine several delivery methods within a single course, and students carry a mix of courses in their schedules.This approach reflects a world in which attendance exclusively in a traditional classroom is no longer de rigueur. A NEW EMPHASIS ON LEARNING OUTCOMES If being counted present and serving time matter less, then something else – learning outcomes – has become more important. The very meaning of outcomes changes in the parts of the cyber world that stress learning goals in each course. Interest in finding out effectiveness of online learning might also produce a closer look at the learning outcomes in traditional classrooms.One example, Excelsior College in Albany, NY, operated on a philosophy of “what a person knows is more important than where and how that knowledge was acquired.”Students had to meet performance criteria in order to earn a degree. Second example, at Western Governors University (WGU), online, students earn degrees from taking tests to demonstrate competencies.WGU did not care how students achieved knowledge on such competencies.WGU students took online courses from other institutions to prepare for the exams. It remains to be seen how friendly the exams to measure standards in pre-collegiate education will be to the online courses increasingly available to online students.It is altogether possible that the outcomes orientation of e-learning will lend itself to the standards movement. COST EFFECTIVENESS While developing a course for online instruction may be more expensive that creating a classroom course, e-learning in the lone run might enhance productivity to cost effectiveness.Furthermore, e-learning may lead to savings on the construction and maintenance of buildings that will never have to be built.Cyber libraries will be even more useful to students who pursue education entirely online. A background paper for the Washington State Higher Education Coordinating Board asked whether the savings were false.It asserted that while distance ed may relieve institutions of certain expenditures on behalf of students that don’t use the campus, the easier access provided to courses could lead to the matriculation of students who would not otherwise enroll.The paper also said that savings might be less than expected because campuses devote only 20% of their facility space to instruction and support.Distance ed is a complement to brick-and-mortar, not a substitute. The University of Phoenix found that it cost more to deliver online courses than in person, if done properly.Fewer students per course.Higher cost to develop courses. All indications are that no one can be certain whether in the long run online learning will prove more or less cost effective than current practices.By the end of the decade, it will be abundantly clear how much it costs to produce a good course online. Controversies Surrounding Cost Effectiveness Controversy swirls about the classroom whenever concerns turn to cost control, whether or not the issue is standardization.As long as jobs appear to be at stake, any attempt to tamper with the traditional configuration of the classroom stirs dispute. Pursuing Partnerships Another aspect of cost effectiveness has to do with wasteful competition and duplication throughout education.The University of Washington was convinced that partnerships were crucial to the expansion of online programs. The new interest in partnerships sparked by online learning may spill over into regular programs. Chapter 12 Serving Those Least Served The more students differ from the traditional norm, the less responsive schools tend to be to meet the needs of those students.The advent of online learning has the potential to enhance service to nontraditional and underserved students. SERVING NONTRADITIONAL AND SPECIAL NEEDS STUDENTS One of the largest groups that benefits from online learning is those students past traditional college-age who commute to classes that they take on a part-time basis.E-learning can also meet the needs to the children of migrant workers, disabled students, pregnant teens, and youngsters living in rural area and inner-city neighborhoods that lack resources and staff within their schools.Online learning also meets the needs of gifted students, and those seeking enrichment and remediation. THE IMPACT OF THE DIGITAL DIVIDE Access has been a dominant concern in both K-12 and higher education in the last half century.E-learning could turn out to be one more manifestation of the digital divide.The technology and knowledge that one needs for comfort with online learning are not distributed evenly across the economic spectrum. The digital gap stretches beyond the schooling of low-income students and almost surely has an impact on their employment prospects. This country needs to install and continually renew a system of interconnection with the capacity to carry the enormous volume of traffic that will surge down the information highway by the end of the decade. BUILDING A SEAMLESS SYSTEM A process of learning that employs technology to free itself from structures of times and place raises fresh questions about the restraints that sustain the separateness of studies.High schools do not always smooth the way for students who would gain from spending part of the day in college courses. It is incumbent on school districts and nearby institutions of higher education to devise ways to bring college-level studies to high school students.The availability of college courses online could bridge this gap. Chapter 13 Redefining the Educational Institution The form and organization of formal education in the US has barely changed in a century.Primary schools achieved their current form in the 19th century and secondary schools took shape in the early 20th century.The ways teachers deliver instruction have remained the same through the decades, and even the calendar of the academic year has stayed steady. WHAT IS AN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION? Online learning is redefining the concept of an educational institution. The Changing Structure It could be that online learning will prove to be a life line for some small remote institutions that have had difficulty attracting more students. E-learning finds itself to building brides between and among disciplines by allowing those who design and teach courses to more readily break through the rigidities that the departmental structure imposes on the organization of knowledge. Online courses, with their inclination to use instructors as facilitators, mentors, and coaches could lead to a devaluation of faculty research. Collaboration Education is becoming more of a collaborative enterprise.The consortium approach did not originate with online learning, but the Internet offers new ways of spreading the concept. The work of the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) assembled a consortium of 16 southeastern states where students on the Electronic Campus have to choose a home institution, but can take any course that is offered. Education may have to adjust to an era in which learning is individual based, not institution based. WHO IS A TEACHER? Online learning alters the role not only of the institutions, but of the teacher as well.Instruction online requires different talents.A good online teacher takes advantage of such devices as electronic bulletin boards and chat rooms to raise the importance of discussion.Discussions are vital to e-learning and cannot be avoided. Shared Responsibility It is possible that those who teach online courses do not have any decisions in the design and/or content of the course. Standardization of content may help to ensure that students achieve prescribed learning objectives. Instructors of online courses are more likely to work at two year colleges, lack doctorates, carry heavier course loads, spend more time on student contact out of class, keep slightly more office hours, not to have tenure, and work part-time without faculty standing. Learning to be a Different Sort of Teacher Whatever title they have, instructors of online courses needs training to learn how to use the software and how to interact with student electronically.The training is needed whether they want to put an entire course online or add web-based components to the class. WHAT IS A LIBRARY? The Internet has had greater impact so far on libraries than on courses.It is easier and more efficient to digitize library collections and information retrieval than to deal with the machinations of designing courses for the web and putting them online. Resources for Information Searches In an era when books as physical commodities stop circulating as much, libraries will save money that they might otherwise have spent to re-shelve materials and replace lost or stolen books. Libraries will have to maintain and even find ways to enhance reference for distant users.In 2002, Georgia began its efforts towards Georgia Library Learning Online (GALILEO) to create a single catalogue for its state’s library collection. Access and availability are key elements in the virtual library. Books in the Evolving Digital Library In the 1990s, Questia Media and netLibrary digitized tens of thousands of books and sought to sell access to academic libraries.The idea was that students could avoid trips to the library, obtain access to books on a 24/7 basis, and the library could save money by buying and shelving fewer books.In the final analysis, neither company was able to sell sufficient number of subscriptions for its services. James G. Neal, the Eisenhower Library director at Johns Hopkins who in 2001 became the university librarian for Columbia University, identified the following barriers that he thought libraries would face in this decade as they remake themselves to serve virtual needs:
Technology – the need for bandwidth
Intellectual property – the need for revisions to the law
Learning styles – the need for more pedagogical information
The controversy revolves around whether students in the future will spend as much time in the library building as their peers in former years.
Chapter 14 Online Courses Across the Gamut E-learning will serve students at every level, and students will be involved in online learning whether or not they enroll in courses taught entirely from a distance.This means that online learning will transform the ways of teaching and learning.Technology will allow for more modeling, visualizing, simulating, interacting, collaborating, and analyzing than has usually been the case. The implications are great not only for the curriculum, but for preparation of teachers and professors who must work with those curriculums and for the instructional policies of the schools and colleges that are host to such curriculums.The danger is that the technologies and the accompanying possibilities will outpace educational institutions and the people who work in them. RESPONSES TO WEB-BASED LEARNING Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU) in NJ was among the first campus-based educational institutions in the country to require students to take an online course when it mandated that all of its freshman during the 2001-02 academic year enroll in a course entitled The Global Challenge. The requirement had a twofold purpose: to provide students with courses that have a world view and to make the Internet a fundamental tool for learning. To Go or Not to Go…Online Some colleges and universities have been slow to embrace online learning out of concern that it will alter the character of the institution. Hybrid Courses 80% of the courses using the electronic platforms met in classrooms at the part of the time and employed technology to enlarge upon classroom-based education. SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS IN K THROUGH 12 EDUCATION Elementary and secondary providers apparently spend less money to develop and design online courses.However, the programs are still in their infancy. In spite of some advances in FL and other states, pre-collegiate education may respond less readily than higher education to the opportunities afforded by technology.The two reasons for this include: the lag time that slows innovation and the organizational structure. Course Taking Patterns In Missouri, students had to pay out of pocket to take online courses. The Federal Government’s Virtual High School One model of online learning that could guide programs at the elementary and secondary level was the federally sponsored Virtual High School (VHS), a five year pilot project.In most cases, students enrolled in VHS courses that were not available in the high schools’ classroom-based programs. VHS, which depended on teachers in the participating real high school to design and teach the courses, also demonstrated how professional development fits into the expansion of online learning.Teachers had to successfully complete a graduate-level, online professional development course given by VHS; they could take a 26-week course to design and prepare their own network-based course or a 15-week course to learn to teach an existing course developed by someone else. ONLINE COURSES AND THE FUTURE The National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) issued a report on e-learning near the end of 2001 that praised the process, but at the same time, urged caution upon schools as they venture forth into cyber age. NABE recommended the state policymakers seize the opportunity and take the lead to assure that e-learning spreads in ways that strengthen the public education system. It remains to be seen whether online learning will protect and promote quality and integrity in its courses. __ Chapter 15 Educational Purposes in the Cyber Era ** Embedded in the issues raised by competition from online courses are questions about the benefits of face-to-face education and the meaning of the campus experience.However, social interaction occurs in many settings besides those provided by schools and colleges. ADJUSTING PURPOSES TO NEW REALITITES Some students, especially older students in career oriented programs, don’t want the amenities.They say they enroll for the courses alone and desire little else from tan educational institution.The question of the age of cyber learning is what to do about a student who almost never sets foot on campus. Some online students may conclude that they don’t need the rest of the package and refuse to enroll in colleges and universities that won’t adjust charges for them. Online providers of education may teach traditional colleges and universities a lesson in how to treat students as customers.All of education could benefit from this statement. PURPOSES IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS Two of the main reasons why critics wonder about the appropriateness of online courses below the college level are because of these objectives and because of doubts about the suitability of e-learning for less mature students who may not so easily function on their own. The role of schools in socialization gets taken for granted, but it is crucially important. The Center on Education Policy, a Washington D.C. advocate for public education, identified six fundamental purposes and principles of public schools which include:
effective preparation for life, work and citizenship;
social cohesion
universal access and free cost
equity and non-discrimination
public accountability and responsiveness
religious neutrality
While the content of online courses might train a young person for work, one wonders about the preparation for life, citizenship and a shared culture when a student’s education occurs in isolation.Therefore, it is not so clear that an entire schedule of online courses will prepare pre-collegiate students fully for the future. NOT FOR EVERYONE E-learning was not intended as the perfect solution for everyone’s education or training needs. The sustainability of online courses does not depend only on the learner.The way instructors approach their work also determines whether e-learning is right for students. For K-12 education, parents also figure into the equation.
Maeroff, G. I. (2003). A classroom of one: How online learning is changing our schools and colleges. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chapter 1
An Invitation to a Revolution
With the aid of technology wide-range one-on-one education may be closer at hand than ever before. An encounter between student and teacher via the Internet is very different from the exchanges in formal classrooms that have until now characterized education. This fulfillment of the classroom of one embodies an intimacy all its own.
E-learning has come to the scene to augment and sometimes supplant the traditional classroom.
By the end of the 21st century’s first decade, e-learning will be an embedded feature of education, widely available and no longer an object of controversy.
Instructors who incoming years ignore the potential of web-based embellishments will be as remiss as their peers of past years who did not expect students to enrich their learning by consulting sources beyond their books.
Online education is here to stay and the technology will fade into the background for most students, essential but not of great concern to them, a kind of catalyst to a learning revolution.
The future of online learning is taking shape along these lines:
EDUCATIONAL CHOICE
Choice is the order of the day, especially in elementary and secondary education. Charter schools began operating at the start of the 1990s and spread through the country by the end of the decade.
Online learning injects fresh possibilities into the most extreme version of choice, school vouchers, raising the possibility of awarding vouchers to be spent for online education, including education of a private and secretarian nature that can be carried out at home.
Benefits at the Elementary and Secondary Levels
Online learning may turn out to be the greatest bonus ever for home schooling. At the Western PA Cyber Charter School, instructional methods took four main forms:
Cyber schooling could be a route to public funding to enable children at home to get the education of their choice, even if they study in the privacy of their homes as a religious slant.
Online learning could make inroads among the 53 million children who study at the elementary and secondary level.
GLOBALIZATION AND THE IMPLICATIONS FOR ONLINE EDUCATION
The need for new ways to deliver education is seen in its starkest terms outside the US. The educational challenge remains monumental in many parts of the world.
Online Learning around the World
On top of fiscal obstacles, geographic constraints in societies that are still mostly rural make it impossible to gather a critical mass of students in many places. The problems feed upon themselves. Political instability, too, haunts the classrooms that do exist in underdeveloped countries. In addition, ethnic minorities and disabled children need not even try to enter classrooms in countries where discrimination is ripe.
Events in several parts of the world at the beginning of this century underscored the growing possibilities for e-learning. Examples: Tunisia, Japan, Britain, the University of Virginia, The United States Army
Controversy over the Globalization of Learning
Trade regulation is not the only threat to worldwide cyber learning. Those who want to control the globalization of education through the Internet have other weapons in their arsenal, making it possible for them to use technology to trump technology.
Finally, there is a matter of ensuring that the quality of the online version of an American education offered overseas equals what students get on campus.
INFLUENCE ON POLICY
Making Other Adjustments
Policies regarding the implementation of online learning will have to take greater cognizance of the impact on teaching.
Schools, colleges, and universities should recognize as they move toward an online presence that success depends on acting in ways that encourage and assist faculty to alter habits and attitudes that have sustained their entire careers.
Teaching online calls for a thoughtful interweaving of the old and the new, making a course more than simply a collection of lecture notes delivered by computer.
It would be unwise to regard online learning as the salvation of education, the panacea for the ills of a system that has often been inflexible and reluctant to change.
Online courses are revolutionary because they represent a fundamentally different delivery system that breaks the monopoly of a classroom forcing an examination of habits of teaching and learning that for too long have defied scrutiny. Online learning will not banish the many problems of teaching and learning, but it offers one more tool for trying to deal with them.
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Chapter 2
Delivering the Goods
The ability to learn depends, as always, primarily on the learner, regardless of setting. Interaction with an instructor and even with other students can help promote learning, but it is clearly not essential.
Attendance in a classroom remains the standards by which most people define as “going to school”, and they will do so for the foreseeable future. Using a computer as the main vehicle for formal education remains alien to most Americans.
The time has arrived to encourage learning that breaks free of the classroom if it can serve the needs of students without short-changing them.
DISTANCE EDUCATION HISTORY
Online learning stemmed from correspondence courses from such institutions as The University of Missouri, Penn State.
Each advance in technology during the twentieth century added its imprint to distance education. Film in the first two decade, radio in the 20s and 30s, the TV in the 1950s.
The newness of online learning in not the use of distance education or the idea that students might pursuer knowledge largely on their own, but the fact that it harnesses digital technology for this purpose.
REALITIES OF THE TRADTIONAL CLASSROOM
“The reason that students can remember the few teachers who changed their lives is because genuine interactions between teachers and students are so rare.”
“On-campus, real-time, face-to-face teaching relations are experienced by some prospective students as high-pressure, uncomfortable and even exclusionary circumstances.”
“The majority of individuals learn little from someone’s simply telling them something, but this is precisely what continues to happen in a tremendous number of classrooms across the country.”
The most familiar mode of learning for most Americans is a straightforward lecture. Detractors deplore lecture method as uninspired, nonparticipatory, unengaging, and nonproductive of learning.
Lectures are by no means the sum and substance of online learning, nor should they be, but so long as instructors lecture they may as well do so at a time and place convenient to students, which online education permits.
ONLINE LEARNING AS AN ALTERNATIVE
Examples: University of Central Florida was pushed into online education because it ran out of space in parking lots, San Diego State University, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
E-learning elicits anew familiar questions about pedagogical practices. How long should students take to submit work? How quickly should e-messages receive responses? What should instructors do about students who fail to contribute to collaborative assignments or do not sign into courses regularly? How may one monitor cheating and plagiarism when students work out of sight? Are there occasions to ask students, if possible, to gather in person? Which tasks are best done synchronously or asynchronously? What instructional responsibilities can instructors rightfully delegate to assistants?
Delivering Content
The main goal of e-learning is convenience for the learner, rendering it unnecessary to appear at a certain place at a certain time.
Knowing that a course is delivered online does not reveal the extent to which the instructor created the course. And it is this idea, the possibility that someone other than the instructor produced the content that adds to the controversy surrounding online education.
Designing Courses for Web Delivery
It is, in fact, possible that it can take longer, up to 66 to 500 percent longer, according to a study by the American Federation of Teachers, to create an online course than to prepare a course to teach in person.
The demands of course design resonate in ways that those unfamiliar with online learning may not immediately appreciate. All aspects of digital design should strive for simplicity to enable students to concentrate on learning.
E-learning, to a degree greater than any previous way of formally distributing knowledge, offers the possibility of disaggregating content, design and instruction.
Instructing Online
Online learning calls for fresh attention to the need to engage students, to respond to them properly and efficiently, and to ensure each step of the way that students understand the course work even though they are not in the same room to say in person that they “don’t get it”.
Good online learning requires considerable preparation. It begins with content. Then, technology enters the picture and rearranges the elements in ways that make e-leaning considerably different from the classroom. The design of the course, the way it goes onto the web, and the manner which students access it affect outcomes. The person leading the course becomes the intermediary between content and student.
Students on the receiving end of knowledge delivered in this way must prepare themselves for a more active role than they have taken in regular classrooms. No passive vessels here.
Chapter 3
The Nature of Interaction
Online providers face the challenge of countering the possible negative effects of isolation in a classroom of one.
Florida Virtual strove to ensure that e-learning did not lead students to complete their course work in isolation. The school asked teachers to contact students on a regular basis.
Online education has the potential to transform interaction into a learning task. Online courses have to give students opportunities to interact with the instructor and with each other.
An online course, properly crafted, builds in many opportunities for students to advance their learning through responses and discussion.
The enhancement of online learning through interaction comes in both synchronous and asynchronous exchanges.
KEEPING STUDENTS ENGAGED IN VIRTUAL CLASSROOMS
The Florida Virtual School tried to offset the isolation of students by offering them the chance to join clubs.
Another form of interaction in online learning involves putting classmates in contact in “live” time. Synchronous approaches in which students are online concurrently replicate some of the spontaneity of the classroom.
Written discussion replaces oral discourse in online learning.
A PLATFORM FOR LEARNING
Most educational institutions depend on commercial companies to provide the technological expertise that enables them to offer online courses and to make them interactive.
Platform Companies include:
Blackboard, Inc.
ECollege
WebCT
Apex Learning
Adjuncts to Platforms – other tools
Horizonlive
eArmyU.com
SMARTTHINKING
GALILEO
COLLABORATION
Proponents of the virtual classroom speak often of learning communities, students working together in groups to advance their knowledge. Advocates of collaborative inquiry maintain that this approach stimulates and supports students, motivating them to learn.
Online education can multiply the advantages for students, many of whom welcome interaction that helps overcome some of the isolation.
Group learning online still has many of the same strengths and weaknesses as group learning by students who attend courses in person.
Online groups bog down with lazy members.
Large class size can overwhelm possibilities of collaboration
Online learning communities, connected by software, enable students to collaborate with classmates whom they never see, and effort to emulate in virtual settings one of the features of well-organized courses that meet in person.
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Chapter 4
Facilitating the Conversation
INTERACTING ELECTRONICALLY
Most of today’s cyber learning builds on that relationship and, in some ways, represents an elaboration on the ways of correspondence – providing an ease, speed and capacity for the written word far exceeding what was possible by mail. Instructors of online courses say that cyber learning has electronic dialogue at its heart. Key components include: electronic bulletin boards, chat rooms, and email. These communication methods hold the potential for turning online courses into seminars.
Email
While online learning would be unthinkable without email, it serves as a vital resource of many courses that meet entirely in classrooms.
One of the most important roles of email in online learning is the access to the instructor that it provides for students. This way of communicating interweaves the schedules of morning people and night people, those who travel and those who remain on campus.
Can the ease of email lead to too much interaction? Online course should take steps to not let a flood of email inundate them.
Bulletin Boards and Chat Rooms
Much of e-learning depends on more than reading the lessons. Instructors use electronic discussions to extend and elaborate on what students have read.
The anonymity of online interaction can cut in two ways. Physical features of people who might be subject to bias in person are not apparent, yet there is a downside to removing signs of physical differences. Also, online discussions lacking face-to-face proximity, lead to unpleasantries in some courses.
Video and Audio
Videoconferencing could well remain an important technology despite the availability of the web.
The telephone remains a toll of distance education during the cyber age.
In many of the best online courses, electronic conversation is an important vehicle of learning. This means not only teacher-to-student conversation, but also student-to-student.
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Chapter 5
Adapting to the New
College students come to college with an understanding of the tools of technology.
HOW ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY STUDENTS ADAPT
Indications are the many more students in elementary and secondary school would take courses online if supporters promoted the concept and more spaces were available to enroll.
The first two schools developed online from K12, Inc were Pennsylvania Virtual Charter School and Colorado Virtual Academy.
Online studies are not appropriate for all youngsters. The executive director of Florida Virtual uses a simple three-part test.
CHALLENGES IN ADAPTING TO ONLINE LEARNING
If the content of the courses in unsatisfactory, e-learning will lose potential adherents no matter how many people turn on.
Achievement
Proponents of distance education, including online learning, have been so focused on the question of whether the process leads to the same achievement levels as classroom-based instruction that they have a website dedicated to this issue.
A review of findings on student achievement from one group of researchers concluded that there were no significant differences in achievement among students taught through various delivery systems.
Another study on student outcomes in sections of a microeconomics course at Michigan State U. found that students scored better on tests if they took the courses in the classroom.
Satisfaction
Educators paid little attention to student satisfaction in their classrooms until college students began rating their professors.
Among research finding are some indicating that interaction between students and instructors tends to increase satisfaction with online learning.
Not surprisingly, students are less satisfied when technical difficulties and poor course design complicate their work on the computer and interfere with their online studies.
In general, students who adapt themselves to e-learning argue that it breeds satisfaction because it offers more convenience than classrooms in terms of time and place.
Faculty cited satisfaction with increased access to students, increased knowledge and experience with educational technologies, increased opportunities for interaction with students, and positive student outcomes.
Learning Styles
While researchers have much to learn about how online learning meshes with learning styles, one study on this question found that students with sequential learning styles showed more preference for online education than did other kinds of learners.
Other Considerations
Students in online courses appear to have more staying power than those in correspondence courses.
Online learning extends great independence to students, requiring them to have motivation and to common up more self-discipline than the usual classroom course demands.
Technology, when it goes awry, exacerbates the problem, creating disincentives that courses in the classroom can avoid.
ADAPTATIONS BY FACULTY
While online learning calls for obvious adaptations on the part of students, it also requires much of the same of faculty, almost all of whom have spent their careers meeting students in classrooms.
Helping Online Instructors Adapt
Commercial software, like Blackboard, helps create content, mange courses and carry out interactive activities eases the transition to e-learning for faculty members.
Learning the Steps of a New Dance
Training is critical for online instructors. The chapter outlines trainings from the University of Phoenix and the Art Institute Online.
It is wrong-minded to assume those who have taught in traditional classrooms will automatically be able to do the same in a virtual classroom.
Chapter 6
Responsibility for Learning
Students need to be prepared to take online courses. Self-assessments are a common method to find out student preparedness. Such questions include:
TRUST
The formal classroom, in part, is predicated on the assumption that many students lack initiative: someone needs to prod them. The idea is that sitting in a classroom will prevent them from doing something else during time assigned for their learning. For the most part, a lack of trust pervades the traditional system.
Online education revolves around trust, placing the destiny of students in their hands, an approach that may motivate some learners. Sloth and dishonesty are enemies of online learning.
MOTIVATION
Motivated students make obvious candidates for online courses, but perhaps this kind of education also suits some less obvious candidates, students how have not previously taken responsibility for their learning in traditional classrooms.
Making more the decisions about their education may spur some students to learn. E-learning, who offers greater possibilities for empowering learners in this way, might appeal to some students who have enjoyed limited success in classrooms, where they chafe under authority.
Solving the Motivation Puzzle
Deborah Stipek wrote some recommendations in her book Motivation to Learn that include:
Online courses, pursued in private, might offer respite from these pressures, but this is not an easy solution as some teenagers have little inclination to study on their own.
Instructors at all levels should recognize the need to motivate students. Preparation to teach, in person or online, is incomplete without attention to what teacher can do to prod students to learn.
Those who design online course can bring the far-ranging resources of the Internet to academic tasks that are both creative and filled with substantial learning.
Online learning with its potential for a do-it-yourself approach is replete with motivational possibilities.
“A successful online student has the desire to want to learn and is willing to make the sacrifices of time and effort to do so.”
Life experience and maturity provide perspective that may help motivate certain learners. Given their limited life experiences and the fact that they have not yet embarked on career, younger students probably have different motivational issues.
Ultimately, whether in classrooms or online, students needs to take greater responsibility for their own learning as they advance beyond the elementary grades.
One might characterize online learning as an experiment in the degree to which students can take responsibility for their own education.
LEARNING HOW TO LEARN
The idea that students should learn how to learn has been a fundamental principle of formal education. In the book How People Learn, the National Research Council said that students must learn to recognize when they understand the materials at hand and when they need more information. The book proposed three key questions about students that go to the core of self-directing learning:
Knowing how to learn means pacing oneself.
Regardless of the content of an online course, a student has to figure out how to navigate through avenues and to recognize landmarks never before encountered.
Students need to know how to conduct research and look for answers.
STUDENT SUPPORT SERVICES
Expecting online students to take responsibility for their learning should not absolve educational institutions of certain obligation, especially in terms of technical and academic support.
An institution that doesn’t plan to offer steady and reliable technical support to its students ought not to bother with online learning.
Technical Support
Difficulties that have nothing to do with the content of the lessons can readily undo online leaning if left unattended.
Academic Support
Online education tends to give less attention to academic support than to technical support. A lack of academic support can exacerbate feelings of isolation and undermine online students.
An example of the possibilities of online academic support comes from a company that specialized in this area, leaving it to others to offer the actual courses – SMARTTHINKING, Inc. The company was bale to offer the service around the clock by including on its staff English-speaking tutors abroad.
Academic support of this sort could very likely raise retention rates and course completion in online courses, where students sometime give up in frustration.
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Chapter 7
The Business of Online Education
Education has not been immune from the mania for profits that wept through the digital world and fueled the dot-com phenomenon. Most online education ended up in the hands of traditional colleges and universities. A sizable portion of online providers, though, were commercial enterprises with no links to nonprofit education.
COMPETING FOR STUDENTS AND MONEY
One must distinguish hybrid or blended courses that incorporate features of both classroom and the WWW from courses that are wholly online.
Implementing e-learning was for many educational institutions a defensive action.
Competition of all sorts has plowed its way into education.
Questions arose at the elementary and secondary level as states and local school districts went online with cyber public schools, often operating under charters. PA’s experience was instructive. The state passed a charter school act in 1997 which cyber schools were founded. The law provided charter schools with 80 percent of the amount that the home district would have spent on the child in the regular school. Students in PA gained the ability to attend charter schools anywhere in the state.
The provision meant, however, that the per-pupil amounts following each child to a cyber charter school varied, according to the spending of the child’s district. The charter school spent an average of $6,000 per pupil. Some public school systems refused to pay the invoices that cyber charter schools sent for the children who resided in the districts.
The idea that proponents of online learning have taken advantage of charter legislation to establish schools should offend no one. A cyber school is as legitimate a charter school as one that classrooms provide. What has proven disturbing has been the failure of some such schools to monitor the progress of students and to maintain educational quality.
One study of the financing of virtual K though 12 schools proposed a two-stage implementation strategy for states across the country. In the first stage, states would heavily subsidize the cost of online courses used by public schools. In the second stage, public schools would gradually assume the costs of online courses and would not charge regularly enrolled students.
Nick Trombetta, superintendent of the Midland PA SD and CEO of the Western PA Cyber Charter School operated by the district, said that while he was pleased to see the school thrive, he worried that the rush to create such online K12 schools would drain dollars from school districts across PA, undermining public education in regular schools.
One of the difficulties facing those who seek gain from online learning and even not-for-profit providers has been a paucity of reliable information about the field.
“No one knows how many students taken an e-learning course in any given year; now how much colleges and universities spend d in pursuit of e-learning initiatives; now what the students themselves spend.”
Some companies involved in online education profit from the infrastructure, not the courses. Other companies create and sell courses and even offer courses that generate tuition revenues from accredited institutions.
EARLY MISHAPS ON THE PATH TO PROFITS
Virtual Temple was supposed to liberate the university from some pressures, but it turned out to be a far more expensive undertaking that the decision makers apparently anticipated. The university apparently discovered that it could not afford the steep costs associated with creating online courses, marketing them, and building and maintaining an infrastructure to support the online enterprise.
NYUonline also experiences a similar demise. Both Virtual Temple and NYUonline hold several lessons for other institutions.
A BUSINESSLIKE APPROACH
Traditional higher education’s fascination with the goal of profiting from online ventures had its counterpart in the trend by for-profit businesses to extend them into conventional learning.
Three universities took a businesslike approach to online learning including, Penn State, Cornell and Columbia.
BUSINESS IN EDUCATION
For businesses, the web represents just another method for trying to boost profits. One example is Sylvan Leaning Systems.
E-learning has become a vehicle by which some universities take on more and more attributes of business, with interlocking subsidiaries and infusions of venture capital.
Chapter 8
Focusing E-Learning on Careers
THE SPECIAL CASE OF PROFESSIONAL AND CONTINUING EDUCATION
Close Ties to Technical Education
The Pursuit of Career-Oriented Students
Both for-profit providers and traditional institutions of higher education have recognized that one of the best chances for early acceptance of online courses resized in offering them to people who must need them for instrumental purposes, courses with content to advance their careers or allow them to embark on new careers.
HOW TWO UNIVERISTIES PURUSED WORKING ADULTS
Recognizing career-minded, working adults as a prime constituency for online learning, some colleges and universities carefully structured their approach to appeal to this market.
THE CONTINUING EDUCATION OF TEACHERS
Purveyors of online learning see elementary and secondary teachers as constituting one of the biggest potential markets. State regulations and collective bargaining contracts mandate that teachers engage in continued learning, so-called in-service education, once they are on the job.
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Chapter 9
But is it Legitimate?
Plagiarism is a long standing problem that technology exacerbates. Though it would not end the practice, it would help if instructors did more to teach students the elements of research and deepen their understanding of the differences between citing someone else’s work and appropriating it as one’s own.
“There is more cause for concern about academic integrity in the average freshman or sophomore lecture hall than there is online”, said Wallace Pond, chief academic officer of Education America’s online campus.
“In a well-taught online course with an involved professor and 25 students, it would be difficult for a student to put bits and pieces of someone else’s work into his work. Everything, every word, in an online course is archived. The professor can go back and review all of the student’s work.” – Pond
HOLDING ONLINE TO A HIGHER STANDARD
Why hold online learning to a higher standard than other kinds of distance education or, for that matter, than traditional classroom education?
Critics are concerned that what may appear to be a proper academic course online may actually lack quality control.
EVALUATING ONLINE LEARNING
One of the most common questions about online learning is whether it is better than education in the classroom, implying that being as good is not enough. Research is just starting to emerge. Two of the most obvious yardsticks have to do with course design and the interactivity of the course.
The happy medium in design reflects itself in a course that takes advantage of technology to deepen education, making it more memorable and providing learning experiences beyond those apt to be possible without the Internet. Interactivity should use technology to connect students in meaningful ways to the instructor and to each other.
Evaluations of MBA courses at the University of Baltimore suggest that:
SPECIAL PROBLEMS IN ASSESSING ONLINE STUDENTS
Proctors and Other Assessment Devices
The question of who is taking the tests and doing the work that students submit as their own continues to plague online providers. It is incumbent on schools and colleges to do all they can to guarantee the integrity of the process. Invisibility remains one of the most troubling features. The growth and acceptance of online educational depends on providers’ assuring the legitimacy of academic outcomes.
Florida Virtual conducts phone conversations with students to ensure student knowledge of key topics.
Assessment as an Ongoing Process
The irony of concern about how best to assess student sin online course to prevent dishonesty is that it comes when online testing of students in classroom-based course is proliferating.
Careful test design and diligent monitoring reduce dishonesty, but cheating occurs whether students take tests in person or online.
The idea of separating education from traditional classrooms and, moreover, making it dependent on technology offends some people. Yet, another concern lurks among those who challenge the legitimacy of e-learning.
Perhaps the best action may be to give e-learning a chance, recognizing that, like all infants, it will take some flops, and to wait and see what emerges. In the meanwhile, brick-and-mortar institutions can learn from it, shamelessly borrow from it, and co-opt its best features.
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Chapter 10
Controlling the Process
Many of the laws and regulations affecting education will have to change to accommodate the possibilities made possible in teaching and learning online. Online courses demand a new way to deal with funding formulas, attendance and time requirements for courses, residency rules, and eligibility for financial aid, the mandated size of library collections, standards for academic credit, student-teacher ratios, and pay scales.
THE ROLE OF ACCREDITATION
Applying the Right Criteria
Sandra Elman of the Northwest Association of Schools, Colleges and Universities said, “What is important is that [online learning] not be any more rigorous or any less rigorous. You want a level of consistency and equity in dealing with a new dimension of instruction. It should not be held to a high standard.”
Accrediting agencies potentially face many questions as they scrutinize online learning. They should look for differences in content and quality between courses offered in classrooms and over the Internet and see whether institutions hold students in classrooms and online to identical standards.
The Report of the Web-Based Education Commission to the President and the Congress on the US recommend these six proposals for accreditors to consider in connection with online courses:
Sorting Out Accreditation Issues
REGULATION ISSUES
Wrestling with New Issues
Defining Quality
Course offered online vary greatly not only in quality but in the degree to which they are scrutinized by the institutions that offer them.
Officials of the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) said they were uncertain of the effects of the Principles of Good practice, which the organization promulgated for the 2000-01 academic year. They believed, though, that a three-step process they established to undergird the principles helped promote good practice
Dealing with K through 12 Cyber Schools
Aside from the quality of the learning, much of the concern about theses schools centers on matters of funding and accountability.
Critics generally do not accept the notion, though, of pupils in elementary and secondary schools taking their entire program online. They worry that usually only adults have sufficient motivation to study online. They see cyber schools as a financial threat to brick-and-mortar schools. One must question the advisability of letting several cyber schools operate in a single state, such as PA.
Ohio and PA provide ideal cases for examining these issues. In both state, cyber education gained a foothold b flying under the radar, using laws that authorized charter schools to establish themselves. In PA, the state school board association similarly challenged the law that it said authorized charter schools to serve individual schools districts, not the entire state, as the cyber charter schools ended up doing.
THE FACULTY CONNECTION
No discussion of quality standards for online learning can be complete without consideration of the ways in which the process affects the role of teachers and their relationships to students.
Faculty worries how online learning will affect the institution’s reputation, but their concerns do not stop there. They fear they may be asked to do more work without adequate remuneration. They pose questions about quality control. They wonder about job protection.
Extra Work
Institutions still struggle to determine whether the work involved in teaching an online course equals a course taught in person, or whether an altogether different formula should apply.
Another aspect of the workload has to do with contact time with students. Students expect quick responses to their e-mails and to contributions to discussions.
The US Dept. of Education found that those teaching distance education courses had slightly more office hours and more contact with students, including amore extensive exchange of e-messages with students, than colleagues who did not teach such courses.
According to the report, those teaching distance education courses “appeared to interact with students or be available to them more” than their colleagues who only taught face-to-face classes.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS
The American Council on Education (ACE) said that ownership of electronic courses could be evaluated along a continuum that depended on whether faculty created courses on their own initiative (owned by the faculty member), under a contract with the institution (owned by the institution), or as a combination or the two (owned by both). The organization recommended a six step process for colleges and universities to follow to clarify questions involving intellectual property.
The other side of this issue has to do with protecting not just the intellectual property of faculty who put their materials online, but material that others have produced and the faculty appropriate for use in the online course.
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Chapter 11
In School, On Campus
The threat posed by online learning may lead traditional schools to make themselves over in ways more friendly to students and more closely aligned with students’ actual needs, in and out of the classroom.
THE TIME AND PLACE OF LEARNING
Distance education’s most distinguishing feature is the ability it gives students to learn at their own pace at a place of their choosing.
When instructors move their courses to the Internet to facilitate pacing, they usually stipulate a length of time by which students must complete various phases of the work.
There seems to be a consensus that online courses best serve the interests of students when they contain deadlines that keep students involved in the work.
Virtual High School found that “timeline and deadlines must be clear and must be enforced…with explicit consequences if they are not met.”
Online learning causes more frequent questioning of the need for precise requirements for seat time. It underscores the challenge to the rigid structure of the traditional system of semesters and quarters that dictates the length of courses and speed with which students may advance.
Until the 1960s, students spent 4 years at a single institution. Transferring from one college to another represented failure in those days.
Most students enrolled in online courses today are also on-campus learners who take an online course or two in addition to campus classes.
Faculty members combine several delivery methods within a single course, and students carry a mix of courses in their schedules. This approach reflects a world in which attendance exclusively in a traditional classroom is no longer de rigueur.
A NEW EMPHASIS ON LEARNING OUTCOMES
If being counted present and serving time matter less, then something else – learning outcomes – has become more important.
The very meaning of outcomes changes in the parts of the cyber world that stress learning goals in each course.
Interest in finding out effectiveness of online learning might also produce a closer look at the learning outcomes in traditional classrooms. One example, Excelsior College in Albany, NY, operated on a philosophy of “what a person knows is more important than where and how that knowledge was acquired.” Students had to meet performance criteria in order to earn a degree.
Second example, at Western Governors University (WGU), online, students earn degrees from taking tests to demonstrate competencies. WGU did not care how students achieved knowledge on such competencies. WGU students took online courses from other institutions to prepare for the exams.
It remains to be seen how friendly the exams to measure standards in pre-collegiate education will be to the online courses increasingly available to online students. It is altogether possible that the outcomes orientation of e-learning will lend itself to the standards movement.
COST EFFECTIVENESS
While developing a course for online instruction may be more expensive that creating a classroom course, e-learning in the lone run might enhance productivity to cost effectiveness. Furthermore, e-learning may lead to savings on the construction and maintenance of buildings that will never have to be built. Cyber libraries will be even more useful to students who pursue education entirely online.
A background paper for the Washington State Higher Education Coordinating Board asked whether the savings were false. It asserted that while distance ed may relieve institutions of certain expenditures on behalf of students that don’t use the campus, the easier access provided to courses could lead to the matriculation of students who would not otherwise enroll. The paper also said that savings might be less than expected because campuses devote only 20% of their facility space to instruction and support. Distance ed is a complement to brick-and-mortar, not a substitute.
The University of Phoenix found that it cost more to deliver online courses than in person, if done properly. Fewer students per course. Higher cost to develop courses.
All indications are that no one can be certain whether in the long run online learning will prove more or less cost effective than current practices. By the end of the decade, it will be abundantly clear how much it costs to produce a good course online.
Controversies Surrounding Cost Effectiveness
Controversy swirls about the classroom whenever concerns turn to cost control, whether or not the issue is standardization. As long as jobs appear to be at stake, any attempt to tamper with the traditional configuration of the classroom stirs dispute.
Pursuing Partnerships
Another aspect of cost effectiveness has to do with wasteful competition and duplication throughout education. The University of Washington was convinced that partnerships were crucial to the expansion of online programs.
The new interest in partnerships sparked by online learning may spill over into regular programs.
Chapter 12
Serving Those Least Served
The more students differ from the traditional norm, the less responsive schools tend to be to meet the needs of those students. The advent of online learning has the potential to enhance service to nontraditional and underserved students.
SERVING NONTRADITIONAL AND SPECIAL NEEDS STUDENTS
One of the largest groups that benefits from online learning is those students past traditional college-age who commute to classes that they take on a part-time basis. E-learning can also meet the needs to the children of migrant workers, disabled students, pregnant teens, and youngsters living in rural area and inner-city neighborhoods that lack resources and staff within their schools. Online learning also meets the needs of gifted students, and those seeking enrichment and remediation.
THE IMPACT OF THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
Access has been a dominant concern in both K-12 and higher education in the last half century. E-learning could turn out to be one more manifestation of the digital divide. The technology and knowledge that one needs for comfort with online learning are not distributed evenly across the economic spectrum.
The digital gap stretches beyond the schooling of low-income students and almost surely has an impact on their employment prospects.
This country needs to install and continually renew a system of interconnection with the capacity to carry the enormous volume of traffic that will surge down the information highway by the end of the decade.
BUILDING A SEAMLESS SYSTEM
A process of learning that employs technology to free itself from structures of times and place raises fresh questions about the restraints that sustain the separateness of studies. High schools do not always smooth the way for students who would gain from spending part of the day in college courses.
It is incumbent on school districts and nearby institutions of higher education to devise ways to bring college-level studies to high school students. The availability of college courses online could bridge this gap.
Chapter 13
Redefining the Educational Institution
The form and organization of formal education in the US has barely changed in a century. Primary schools achieved their current form in the 19th century and secondary schools took shape in the early 20th century. The ways teachers deliver instruction have remained the same through the decades, and even the calendar of the academic year has stayed steady.
WHAT IS AN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION?
Online learning is redefining the concept of an educational institution.
The Changing Structure
It could be that online learning will prove to be a life line for some small remote institutions that have had difficulty attracting more students.
E-learning finds itself to building brides between and among disciplines by allowing those who design and teach courses to more readily break through the rigidities that the departmental structure imposes on the organization of knowledge.
Online courses, with their inclination to use instructors as facilitators, mentors, and coaches could lead to a devaluation of faculty research.
Collaboration
Education is becoming more of a collaborative enterprise. The consortium approach did not originate with online learning, but the Internet offers new ways of spreading the concept.
The work of the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) assembled a consortium of 16 southeastern states where students on the Electronic Campus have to choose a home institution, but can take any course that is offered.
Education may have to adjust to an era in which learning is individual based, not institution based.
WHO IS A TEACHER?
Online learning alters the role not only of the institutions, but of the teacher as well. Instruction online requires different talents. A good online teacher takes advantage of such devices as electronic bulletin boards and chat rooms to raise the importance of discussion. Discussions are vital to e-learning and cannot be avoided.
Shared Responsibility
It is possible that those who teach online courses do not have any decisions in the design and/or content of the course.
Standardization of content may help to ensure that students achieve prescribed learning objectives.
Instructors of online courses are more likely to work at two year colleges, lack doctorates, carry heavier course loads, spend more time on student contact out of class, keep slightly more office hours, not to have tenure, and work part-time without faculty standing.
Learning to be a Different Sort of Teacher
Whatever title they have, instructors of online courses needs training to learn how to use the software and how to interact with student electronically. The training is needed whether they want to put an entire course online or add web-based components to the class.
WHAT IS A LIBRARY?
The Internet has had greater impact so far on libraries than on courses. It is easier and more efficient to digitize library collections and information retrieval than to deal with the machinations of designing courses for the web and putting them online.
Resources for Information Searches
In an era when books as physical commodities stop circulating as much, libraries will save money that they might otherwise have spent to re-shelve materials and replace lost or stolen books.
Libraries will have to maintain and even find ways to enhance reference for distant users. In 2002, Georgia began its efforts towards Georgia Library Learning Online (GALILEO) to create a single catalogue for its state’s library collection.
Access and availability are key elements in the virtual library.
Books in the Evolving Digital Library
In the 1990s, Questia Media and netLibrary digitized tens of thousands of books and sought to sell access to academic libraries. The idea was that students could avoid trips to the library, obtain access to books on a 24/7 basis, and the library could save money by buying and shelving fewer books. In the final analysis, neither company was able to sell sufficient number of subscriptions for its services.
James G. Neal, the Eisenhower Library director at Johns Hopkins who in 2001 became the university librarian for Columbia University, identified the following barriers that he thought libraries would face in this decade as they remake themselves to serve virtual needs:
The controversy revolves around whether students in the future will spend as much time in the library building as their peers in former years.
Chapter 14
Online Courses Across the Gamut
E-learning will serve students at every level, and students will be involved in online learning whether or not they enroll in courses taught entirely from a distance. This means that online learning will transform the ways of teaching and learning. Technology will allow for more modeling, visualizing, simulating, interacting, collaborating, and analyzing than has usually been the case.
The implications are great not only for the curriculum, but for preparation of teachers and professors who must work with those curriculums and for the instructional policies of the schools and colleges that are host to such curriculums. The danger is that the technologies and the accompanying possibilities will outpace educational institutions and the people who work in them.
RESPONSES TO WEB-BASED LEARNING
Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU) in NJ was among the first campus-based educational institutions in the country to require students to take an online course when it mandated that all of its freshman during the 2001-02 academic year enroll in a course entitled The Global Challenge.
The requirement had a twofold purpose: to provide students with courses that have a world view and to make the Internet a fundamental tool for learning.
To Go or Not to Go…Online
Some colleges and universities have been slow to embrace online learning out of concern that it will alter the character of the institution.
Hybrid Courses
80% of the courses using the electronic platforms met in classrooms at the part of the time and employed technology to enlarge upon classroom-based education.
SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS IN K THROUGH 12 EDUCATION
Elementary and secondary providers apparently spend less money to develop and design online courses. However, the programs are still in their infancy.
In spite of some advances in FL and other states, pre-collegiate education may respond less readily than higher education to the opportunities afforded by technology. The two reasons for this include: the lag time that slows innovation and the organizational structure.
Course Taking Patterns
In Missouri, students had to pay out of pocket to take online courses.
The Federal Government’s Virtual High School
One model of online learning that could guide programs at the elementary and secondary level was the federally sponsored Virtual High School (VHS), a five year pilot project. In most cases, students enrolled in VHS courses that were not available in the high schools’ classroom-based programs.
VHS, which depended on teachers in the participating real high school to design and teach the courses, also demonstrated how professional development fits into the expansion of online learning. Teachers had to successfully complete a graduate-level, online professional development course given by VHS; they could take a 26-week course to design and prepare their own network-based course or a 15-week course to learn to teach an existing course developed by someone else.
ONLINE COURSES AND THE FUTURE
The National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) issued a report on e-learning near the end of 2001 that praised the process, but at the same time, urged caution upon schools as they venture forth into cyber age.
NABE recommended the state policymakers seize the opportunity and take the lead to assure that e-learning spreads in ways that strengthen the public education system.
It remains to be seen whether online learning will protect and promote quality and integrity in its courses.
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Chapter 15
Educational Purposes in the Cyber Era
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Embedded in the issues raised by competition from online courses are questions about the benefits of face-to-face education and the meaning of the campus experience. However, social interaction occurs in many settings besides those provided by schools and colleges.
ADJUSTING PURPOSES TO NEW REALITITES
Some students, especially older students in career oriented programs, don’t want the amenities. They say they enroll for the courses alone and desire little else from tan educational institution. The question of the age of cyber learning is what to do about a student who almost never sets foot on campus.
Some online students may conclude that they don’t need the rest of the package and refuse to enroll in colleges and universities that won’t adjust charges for them.
Online providers of education may teach traditional colleges and universities a lesson in how to treat students as customers. All of education could benefit from this statement.
PURPOSES IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Two of the main reasons why critics wonder about the appropriateness of online courses below the college level are because of these objectives and because of doubts about the suitability of e-learning for less mature students who may not so easily function on their own.
The role of schools in socialization gets taken for granted, but it is crucially important.
The Center on Education Policy, a Washington D.C. advocate for public education, identified six fundamental purposes and principles of public schools which include:
While the content of online courses might train a young person for work, one wonders about the preparation for life, citizenship and a shared culture when a student’s education occurs in isolation. Therefore, it is not so clear that an entire schedule of online courses will prepare pre-collegiate students fully for the future.
NOT FOR EVERYONE
E-learning was not intended as the perfect solution for everyone’s education or training needs.
The sustainability of online courses does not depend only on the learner. The way instructors approach their work also determines whether e-learning is right for students.
For K-12 education, parents also figure into the equation.